As we finish up this week are moving onto transitioning from back to school to feelings and friendship. Yesterday we read The Recess Queen and created a character web to describe the two main characters in the story, Katie Sue and Mean Jean.
Then we used the character web to illustrate one of the characters. We also talked about how Katie Sue showed kindness to Mean Jean even though Jean was being a bully. In some of the illustrations you can see Katie Sue with a jump rope and Jean bullying other kids and looking angry!
One part of my reading block through the past 4 years has been that of literacy workshop. It is a block of time for my students to work together in small groups to work on important literacy skills, work on social skills, and problem solving. This time allows for me to work closely with students that needs help on deficient skills and work with my students on guided reading.
Students are given a group and they follow a schedule that shows what center they are on. Each center has a card that matches the schedule. The students find the center based on the schedule and the clothespin shows the student what part of the schedule they are on. When the timer goes off students find the center that has the card that matches the next card.
For the first few weeks of school our focus will be on letter recognition. Students will work on matching letters at the pocket chart, playing with magnetic letters (building words if possible), putting together letter puzzles, and finally coloring a back to school book.
In the past few days we started learning about reading skills and academic vocabulary. To fit along with our back to school theme, we read If You Take a Mouse to School. As a class we learned how things happen usually as an effect of something else happening. We created a t-chart to display some examples. Then together we worked on a cutting and gluing activity that illustrated those causes and effects.
Today we continued to work on learning about our names. First we read a sing along book called “The Wheels on the Bus” by Raffi and then sang along to the book after we learned that version of the song. Then we came up with our own silly verse of the wheels on the bus by using the first letter in our name to complete the verse. Instead of making the line, “The wheels on the bus go round and round”, we changed the line to “The wheels on Mr. Bowen’s bus go Bumpity Bumpity Bump.”
We read the story Chicka Chicka Boom Boom and talked about how letters and the alphabet help us read words and sentences. We talked about one of the most important words we should know, and that’s our name! We practiced writing our names and making them by cutting out the letters and gluing them back in order. We also counted the number of letters in our name.
In Kindergarten we are still at split groups until Monday and we have been spending lots of time learning procedures and how to act in school. Today we talked about how nervous we were at the first day of school and compared our feelings to the boys feelings in the book Kindergarten Rocks! We also talked about how at the end of the day, we were no longer scared just like Dexter in the story. We made our first self portraits and we will save them until the end of the year. Then we can go back and look and see how our writing and drawing has changed since the beginning of the year.
For morning centers we worked on using math manipulatives. Mr. Bowen All-Stars got to explore different ways to use the connecting cubes. Some students made patterns while others separated by color.
It has been a fun and exciting summer moving myself to a brand new city and school! I am now teaching solely kindergarten this year and all kindergarten classes are split up into 2 groups. One part of the class goes to school in the morning and the other part of the class goes in the afternoon. This is to help get students used to coming to school if they have never been before. We spent a lot of time the first day on procedures and school expectations. However in Mr. Bowen’s class we do have some fun activities planned for this week. Students came in with all of their supplies and as a school policy we keep their supplies in the class and share them. We had the students and parents sort the supplies so they are all ready to be stored and accessed when needed.
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When talking about rules and procedures we read the story “No David!” by David Shannon. We discussed rules that David broke at home and talked about they applied to the rules at school. Then we started on making David Popsicle stick puppets. When they are all finished we will use the puppets to retell the story. I got the David puppets from here!
The Kindergarten All-Stars 